Political Contribution Mapping: Louisville’s Mayoral Race

We’ve been mapping contributions to all of Kentucky’s political races for a while now, grabbing data from the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance going back to January of 2007. Today we’d like to show how you can narrow this data down to one particular candidate or race, specifically, the race for the new mayor of Louisville, KY.

The Louisville Mayor’s Race

Since 1986, Louisville has had only 2 mayors, and the current mayor Jerry Abramson is now leaving to pursue the office of Lieutenant Governor. That leaves a wide open playing field and a huge host of candidates for this 2010 election. Using the Your Mapper keyword search (a feature on every map that searches the name and descriptions for any keywords), we can take a look at contributors to the upcoming mayoral campaigns. You can then see the results on a map with category markers for Democrat and Republican candidates.

Searching for the term ‘mayor’ brings up all contributions so far for the entire race:

Democrats

Republicans

About the Data

The contribution data includes any person or company that has contributed over a certain minimum amount to any person running for any city, state, or county office in Kentucky. Campaigns then file this information with the state registry as required, usually every quarter. You can search for contributors on the registry’s site, but you are only shown a list of results and details. Of course we think it’s more interesting to view this same data on in avisual overview, with heatmaps, on a visual interactive map of your neighborhood, and on your mobile device. If you’d like to view it some other way, just check out our programming API and roll your own.